


due north

by breadzoned



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Memori - Freeform, Murphy being embarrassed, Secret Santa, murphy's bunker, post 2x16, pound town, this shit is so bad i didn't even know where i was going with this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-05-09 21:23:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5555834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breadzoned/pseuds/breadzoned
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>in this world when people leave they don't come back</p>
            </blockquote>





	due north

**Author's Note:**

  * For [infernalandmortal on tumblr](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=infernalandmortal+on+tumblr).



> this is my first fic that i'm posting on ao3 even though it's not my first one i've ever posted or written  
> it was written for infernalandmortal.tumblr.com for the 100 secret santa (the100secretsantas.tumblr.com) even though they gave no credit and only tagged her and not me even tho i wrote it :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :)
> 
> anyway you can find me on my main tumblr breadzoned.tumblr.com or my art blog illustratable.tumblr.com

There are 3,000 people on the Ark. 

Well, that was the amount the last time Murphy checked, anyway, and that was close to seven years ago. A lot has happened between then and now to reduce the number.

There's the farm station, factory station, textile station. Murphy grew up over in electrical. His father was an electrician, as was his father before that. The sections of the Ark are split into multiple stations and sections that provide for the ship as a whole, every single person in that 3,000 work as a unit to find a common goal: the survival of the human race. 

Well, not  _ every _ person on the Ark has a job. There are the prisoners.

The adults get floated for stealing something as harmless as loaf of bread. But everyone under 18, that is, gets sent to the Skybox because some asshole a hundred years ago decided that executing a minor was inhumane. It probably would never have made a difference for Murphy, anyway. It may have even been easier.

Murphy is a prisoner, but he wasn't always one. There was a time that he was free. It's hard to imagine it now, but the technicals get twisted in his brain even when he's spewing it out for the first time since it happened to Raven. He didn't expect to survive that time, but he did. He didn't expect Raven to survive that time, but she did. Raven’s dying eyes glared at him and he could taste the rottenness of the words on his tongue. The story goes something like this: 

_ He gets the flu. His father steals medicine that turns out wouldn’t help anyway….  _

_ Gets floated for it. _

His dad was the only one who ever really cared for him. He risked his life to get Murphy healthy again and paid the price for it later.

_ Murphy _ paid the price for it later.

_ His mother, she starts drinking pretty heavily after that.  _ Murphy had to trade in some of his rations to get her alcohol. It wasn’t his choice. He did it after she slapped him with the back of her hand so hard he lost two of his teeth.

_ And the last words she says to him before he finds her in a pool of her own vomit is that he killed his father. _

The smell of moonshine in her breath when she spits in his face.  _ You  _ killed  _ him, you monster! _

He was put in jail for nothing except being an unwanted son of a bitch. 

When Murphy was younger, he read books about life before the bombs hit. Orphanages were places that children went if both of their parents were dead. If they had nobody else in the world to care for them. Murphy guessed that if he lived in that time, way back then, he probably would have lived in one. But instead, he got sent to a cell because he’s so unwanted that the Council just pushed him away.

Jaha probably doesn’t even remember his father, or the big gray eyes of the ten year old boy whose dad was only trying to help him. The tears that ran down his feverish cheeks – the fever hadn’t even gone away yet. Jaha couldn’t wait to murder his father. He didn’t even give Murphy the chance to get healthy again.

The next year, his mom. 

And the day after Murphy becomes an orphan… he becomes a prisoner.

He tells the other kids in the Skybox that he assaulted a guard. It’s better than telling them that nobody wants him. It brings up a pretty big name for himself, the other kids think that Murphy has guts, when in reality he cries at night for a future that might have been, with two loving parents, if he hadn’t gotten sick.

Murphy’s in the Skybox for six years until they get sent to Earth.

There are 3,000 people on the Ark. 

The number may sound big, but it's really not. There are no new faces. There are people breathing down your neck constantly. You may not know everyone’s name, but you do know nearly everyone’s face. If you don’t recognize them, you may recognize the family resemblance to their mother or father. You may associate them with their best friend who is in your Earth Skills class.

That's the most startling thing about the ground. It's not the fresh air, the lack of machine hum or the freedom -- which doesn't even last for Murphy -- it's the faces.

There are 3,000 people on the Ark. 

He’s never seen any of them with a tattoo. 

Or with the light brown eyes of the sand when the sun is setting right above it. 

Or the soft skin of her hand -- which is a new thing in itself but Murphy can feel how she is self conscious of it, how she covers it up. 

He’s never been a free man, never ever never, whether that means being trapped in a metal box floating in space or an even smaller cell or hated for jack shit when he finally reaches the ground.

But her eyes…

There’s a snap of a tree branch outside and it snaps Murphy out of his thoughts. He slowly stands up and stares at the door. It’s probably just Jaha. The man is like a cockroach. But something in Murphy’s gut tells him that it’s not. 

Another branch cracks and this time is followed by a string of curses in a language Murphy doesn’t understand, in the Grounder language. 

His stomach twists and he pushes himself forward, looking for something, anything that may help him defend himself. The Wastelanders took all of their weapons. 

The person outside is too quick, and they stumble inside just as Murphy is about to crack a bottle of whiskey over their head. 

It’s her. 

“Emori?” he asks. 

“John,” she says. It startles him. More and more people are calling him by his first name these days, and it reminds him of his father.  _ It will be okay, Johnny. I’ll make sure you get better. _

“You made it,” her voice is hoarse.

Murphy wants to tell her that he was just thinking about her, but he holds his tongue. He takes a step backwards but doesn’t lower the bottle. “Due North,” he says. 

Emori doesn’t seem to notice that he’s holding the bottle above his head, ready to crack it over her’s if she makes any sudden movements. 

She pulls off her headscarf. Murphy tries not to notice. It’s the first time he’s seen her whole face and he wants to admire it but he can’t let himself get distracted.

“I thought…” he trails off. His arms are starting to get sore. Emori turns her head to look at him and he can feel his cheeks warm. He must look ridiculous. “I thought that nobody has been here for hundreds of years.” 

“That’s not true,” Emori says. “I was here last month,” she crosses her arms and stares at him. 

The bottle is suddenly too heavy and Murphy puts it on the table. 

“There were leaves and sand on the solar panels,” he says. 

Emori lifts up an eyebrow. “I don’t know what that is, and I don’t know how to use technology. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t food and water and alcohol here. And not to mention, a warm place to sleep.” 

She pushes past him and grabs at a bag of food and rips it open. “So how do you like it?” 

~~~

“Did the Wastelanders really kill your brother?” Murphy asks her later. He’s still a little leery around her, but she’s been here for two days and hasn’t attacked him, so he’d say that’s a good thing. She may have told him where the City of Light was, but she also betrayed him. 

He doesn't want to look away from her face. Her mouth is full of crackers (the pile in the corner of the room where they put their empty bags getting higher and higher) and the covered hand is clasped around a glass filled with whiskey, ready to be downed. Emori’s eyes twitch when she hears the question and she chugs the glass, only grimacing a little. 

“Yes,” she says. Her voice is hard and rough, and Murphy wonders how much she had to scream to make it sound like that. After Murphy was tortured in the Grounders’ prison camps he thought his voice would never sound the same again. Did she scream when her brother was killed? 

Murphy leans forward with his elbows on the counter. “Then why did you stay with them?” He creases his eyebrows.

Emori looks away from him and pours herself another glass of whiskey. “Where else would I have gone?” She asks. “Back to the clan that cast me out? I had nowhere else to go. I was alone.” Murphy can't think of anything to say in reply so they sit in silence. 

Of course, he understands. After Jaha killed his father Murphy wanted nothing more than to be as far away from the dick as possible. 

After a while Emori clears her throat, “did you have any siblings?”

Murphy shakes his head and presses his fingers together in his lap. “No,” he says. “On the Ark, you weren't allowed to have more than one child.” 

Emori tilts her head to the side. “Why?” 

“There wasn't enough air.” 

Emori looks up at the ceiling as if she's looking up at the Ark. “Nobody had any siblings? Life without him is hard, but I can't imagine if I was all alone in this world from the start.” 

_ Like me, _ Murphy wants to say but he holds his tongue. 

“That didn't stop everyone from going to pound town, though,” Murphy says. “Two of the people who came down here with me are siblings.”

“Pound town?” Emori asks.

Murphy’s cheeks turn bright red.  _ Fuck.  _

She snorts and turns away.

“There was a time when I believed that he would come back. That he wasn’t dead. I stayed with the Wastelanders because I never saw the body. I thought they were trying to scare me into following their orders. It’s been years, now,” Emori puts the glass down and leans against the counter, watching Murphy with sad eyes that everybody seems to have these days. 

“In this world when people leave they don’t come back.”  _ His father. His mother.  _ God, even  _ Jaha  _ left him and Murphy had been hoping that he’d leave him ever since they formally met.

Emori tilts her head back. Murphy doesn’t understand how someone who lost so much, someone who is so little, can be so confident. Her eyebrows quirk upward. “I did.”

“Yeah,” Murphy says. He watches her. He wondered, in the early days of being on the ground where the only thing Murphy knew about the Grounders was that one of them threw a spear at the boy with the googles. He wondered what they looked like, how they survived. He never imagined that they would be anything like Emori. Especially after they tortured him until he told them everything he had been hiding away. 

Against his better judgement, he reaches forward and brushes his fingers against the tattoo that wraps around her eye. “Did it hurt?” Murphy’s voice is barely above a whisper. 

“Yes.” 

“Then why did you get it?”

She pulls away, looking away from him and taking a couple of steps back. Murphy’s hand falls and the slapping sound it makes when it hits his thigh echoes in the room. “I didn’t choose it. It’s a mark. It shows that I’m incapacitated. I can’t fight with a sword if I only have one arm. We’re trained to learn with both so if something does happen, we won’t be unable to fight. I couldn’t do that.” Murphy remembers.  _ My people saw me as a stain in the bloodline. Something to erase. _

He knows what that feels like.  _ Sent to prison for doing nothing except being an unwanted son of a bitch.  _

“We have a lot in common, I think,” he says. 

Emori quirks an eyebrow. “One of your feet is mangled?” She glances at both of his hands.

“No,” Murphy leans back, remembering the last thing he said to her.  _ What a surprise. You’re just like everyone else.  _ But she’s not like everyone else. She’s just like him. “Nobody cares about us. Nobody gives a shit.” He clears his throat. Murphy has never been subtle in his life, and he’s always been loud and obnoxious but right now he doesn’t know how to say how he’s feeling. “Well,” he continues. “Not  _ nobody _ .”

Emori bites her lip. “I know,” she says. 

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She doesn’t look away. “Me too, by the way.” 

“Oh,” he says, and then he’s kissing her and he’s not sure how that happened but one moment he was staring at her and the next his eyes are closed and his hand is against her neck. He can feel her pulse on his fingertips. It’s fast. 

He remembers the cold feel of her knife against his neck. The ache in his back as he had to tilt himself backwards so she could reach his knife. She’s so much shorter than her. 

But now all he can feel is her warm lips against his. And she’s not moving, which isn’t a good thing, but she’s also not pulling away and saying  _ gross!  _ Which is how the first time he ever kissed somebody went, so that is a good thing.

When she doesn’t move after twenty seconds or so, Murphy pulls away. His cheeks are bright red. He should have known. Maybe it was just a misunderstanding. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Emori pulls on the sides of his face and they’re kissing again but this time somebody is kissing him. Emori is kissing him. His hand slides down from her neck down to her waist and she’s pulling on the fabric of his shirt to get her closer to him and he’s smiling but he can’t help it. She laughs against his lips. 

“What did you call it?” she mumbles against his lips, her breath mixing with his. She tastes like whiskey and crackers and even though that’s all Murphy has consumed for months, it’s the best that he’s ever tasted it. “Pound town?” 

Murphy’s cheeks redden and Emori laughs at the sight. She pulls him down to kiss her again.


End file.
